At Flickers of FreedomBruce N. Waller, a compatibilist and the author of Against Moral Responsibility,distinguishes two approaches to conceptualizing compatibilist free will: reason-responsive theories, which “account for free will in terms of an agent’s responsiveness to an adequate spectrum of reasons”, and mesh theories, which “account for free will in terms of a harmoniously functioning mesh of psychic subsystems collectively generating action”. He then gives arguments in favor of his reason-responsive theory.

Clayton Littlejohn at Think Tonkdiscusses Donald Davidson’s view that between the sentences “The short circuit caused the fire” and “Because there was a short circuit, there was a fire” there is a difference in logical form. Littlejohn takes away from this the idea that “we should think of causal relations as holding between events and causal explanatory relations as holding between something else entirely” and queries this proposition.

At M-Phi, a blog dedicated to mathematical philosophy, in a post called “Fermat, set theory, and arithmetic”, guest blogger Colin McLarty, explains his current work on the foundations of mathematics in just 1000 words. McLarty is Truman P. Handy Professor of Intellectual Philosophy and professor of Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University.